One in four Americans believe the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April was staged, a survey released Monday shows a sharp political divide among citizens.
According to a survey by NewsGuard, an online media reliability firm, one in three Democrats believe the incident was staged. For Republicans, the rate is one in eight.
According to the report, young people aged 18 to 29 are more likely to believe the incident was staged than older people.
Last week, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. indicted the alleged gunman, Cole Thomas Allen. He has been charged with four felony counts, including attempted murder of President Donald Trump.
Conspiracy theories spread online immediately after the incident at the Washington Hilton Hotel. These theories claim that the Trump administration itself staged the incident to increase public support for President Trump and the Republican Party.
A NewsGuard survey found that 24 percent of Americans believe the incident was fake. However, 45 percent believe it is true. The remaining 32 percent are not sure.
The survey was conducted by YouGov on 1,000 Americans from April 28 to May 4.
NewsGuard editor Sophia Robinson said, “This is very surprising.” She added that the results highlight the deep distrust of American citizens in government and the media.
Sophia said, “People on all sides of the political spectrum are now losing trust in the current administration and the media.” However, she commented that people are easily trusting information found online without checking.
The White House, however, has rejected these “conspiracy theories.” In a statement to The Washington Post in April, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Washington Post, “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged an attack on himself is a fool.”
Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor who studies media manipulation, said the findings reflect the “showmanship” of Trump’s presidency.
“It’s incredibly Hollywood-like to think that this attack was staged,” Donovan said. He added that the entire government system has been turned into a reality TV show.
Trump was assassinated twice more in 2024, the first at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the second at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The incident occurred shortly after that in April.
There is no evidence that any of the three shootings at Trump rallies were staged. But many Americans still believe that each incident was staged.
24 percent of respondents believe the attempted murder of Butler in Pennsylvania was staged. 42 percent of Democrats believe the incident was a “staged drama.” On the contrary, only 7 percent of Republicans think so.
Meanwhile, 16 percent of Americans believe the attempted murder at the golf club was staged. Of these, 26 percent are Democrats and 7 percent are Republicans.
Overall, 21 percent of Democrats believe that all three incidents were staged. On the contrary, 11 percent of independent voters and only 3 percent of Republicans think so.
Donovan said he was not surprised by the Democrats’ distrust. “There is a growing trend among the left to think about conspiracy theories,” he said. “The main reason for this is the crisis of people’s trust in state institutions.”
Jared Holt, senior researcher at the online extremism monitoring group Open Measures, said that these statistics show how widespread conspiracy theories are in the United States.
Holt said that the results of the survey did not surprise me much. But the situation is certainly disappointing. Conspiracy theories have now become so intertwined with politics that they have become an immediate reaction for a large part of the population.
Donovan said that people naturally get caught up in conspiracy theories when looking for the cause of a complex event.
Donovan added that, unfortunately, when governments or institutions hide the truth or circumvent the rules, people are more likely to believe that there is a deeper conspiracy against them than that the system is corrupt.
